In her poem “Sacrifice,” Black feminist poet Audre Lorde (1934–1992) gives words of warning about inheritance and the transmission of knowledge across generations:
Unless we refuse to sleep
even one night in their houses of marble
the sight of our children’s false pleasure
will undo us
for our children have grown
in the shadow of what was
the shape of marble
between their eyes and the sun.
We do not wish to stand
[like] great marble statues
between our children’s eyes
and their sun.
These words caution against the fantasy of easy solutions for her children’s survival “in the mouth of this dragon we call america” (“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” anthologized in Sister Outsider). Even the most hard-won strategies and triumphs cannot simply be preserved and passed down, because monuments raised to wise ones and great leaders can block new generations from finding their own light, from developing their own crucial insights for survival. People in each generation will need to feel for themselves what matters to them, the warmth of their sun, and let that guide them in developing their own tools—or at least testing the old ones to see if they’re still useful—to make sense of their lives and to forge communities of support and resistance.
Lorde’s warning about the pitfalls of inheritance is an appropriate invocation on the anniversary of Lorde’s birth—February 18, a day she shares with fellow luminary Toni Morrison. Perhaps Lorde’s greatest legacy is how she opened language for experiences previously lacking an easy description—to “give name to the nameless so it can be thought,” as she writes in “Poetry is Not a Luxury.” This has made her an intellectual and spiritual forerunner in the lives of countless feminists, queer people of color, Black women, lesbians, breast cancer survivors, poets, artists, and activists engaged in justice movements around the world. Yet, in popular media and in the mainstream of scholarly discourse, she is too often invoked as marble statue: quoted without context about the master’s tools, self-care, or the erotic, or superficially included as a name in a list of queer and/or Black scholars whose work is acknowledged but not engaged in depth.
Philosophers have much to learn by engaging Lorde not merely as a source of brilliant quotes or a gifted poet describing her life, but as a sophisticated theorist developing explanations of social reality. Lorde’s writing demands close reading, contextualization within her life and her commitments, interpretation, and analysis—in short, the kind of treatment required by every rich and subtle philosophical figure—and her insights can be brought into conversation with other theories and tested against our own lives. (This will be old news to the many Black feminists, women of color philosophers, and allies already drawing on Lorde as a genuine philosophical interlocutor—as well as her many deeply philosophical transdisciplinary readers.)
What does this look like in practice? Well, the philosophy of anger has been the first area reshaped by taking Lorde’s thought seriously, with Myisha Cherry’s The Case for Rage elevating Lorde’s account of righteous anger from reference point to central theory in the field. Social epistemology will probably be next, with Kristie Dotson’s incisive Black feminist philosophy shaping the discourse. (Dotson’s recent coauthored paper with Ayanna De’Vante Spencer uses Lorde to great effect.) A similar shift is likely in political philosophy when philosophers begin reading Lorde’s theories of coalition and difference with the same rigor and care shown her by scholars in feminist theory. (Two articles by political theorist Jack Turner suggest that this is already beginning to happen.)
Here’s a corner of Lorde’s work that I have found insightful: the tension she identifies between safety or security, on one hand, and the richer pursuit of survival, on the other, where survival includes living out and preserving her identity across its many aspects: as Black, as a woman, as a lesbian, as a mother.
In a talk included in a collection of unpublished writings, she writes, “I am constantly defining my selves, for I am, as we all are, made up of so many different parts. But when those selves war within me, I am immobilized, and when they move in harmony, or allowance, I am enriched, made strong.” To retain this integrated, multifaceted identity and allow it to shape her life projects, she must refuse strategies that require giving up some part of who she is for illusive promises of safety: passing as straight, remaining silent in the face of antiblack violence, or quietly enjoying the privileges afforded to her as a “respectable” Black academic. Paying attention to the split between security and survival in Lorde’s thought can shed light on questions of agency and selfhood, and it calls into question some orthodox assumptions about human necessities and the hierarchy of needs.
The rich meaning packed into the word “survival” in Lorde’s work includes this substantive sense of self-preservation, that is, survival as this person—these selves—that she is and is becoming. This requires learning to balance the inner tensions of a multiplicitous identity, fostering integrity and interplay among the aspects of her selfhood, and resisting societal forces that threaten to impose what she describes in Zami, her mythologized memoir, as a “narrow individuation of self” tethered to one mode of living (for example, as Black or as a lesbian) at the expense of the others.
Because her different facets of self must continuously grow and change, Lorde cannot achieve self-preservation simply by orienting her actions toward safety or securing against possibilities of upheaval, pain, or struggle. To pursue security instead of self-preservation, according to Lorde, is to dedicate oneself to a doomed project of insulating against the world, numbing oneself to the difficult feelings that inexorably arise in a life where a person and their loved ones cannot avoid struggle. While security promises physical subsistence, the life’s work of securing against pain and risk brings with it a sacrifice of self and an atrophying of resources for resistance.
In “A Litany for Survival,” perhaps her most widely read poem, Lorde describes the project of security as orienting life toward the “illusion of some safety to be found.” She describes how, for those “who live at the shoreline” of a society shot through with exploitation, antiblackness, misogyny, and heteronormativity, the place of struggle is the present—“seeking a now that can breed futures.” Yet, the illusion that safety might someday be attained drives a perpetual flight from the now, a flight from the pains and insecurity of “standing on the constant edges of decision / crucial and alone,” of always being in between: “lov[ing] in doorways coming and going / in the hours between dawns.” The in-between is intolerable when life is organized around the fantasy of security. Rather than enabling Lorde to inhabit her multiplicitous identity and to fashion relationships of possibility and resistance from her ambiguous social position, the pursuit of security seeks resolution where none is possible: to fit in by achieving total respectability or to escape by refusing to acknowledge the pain of society’s vice grip. For this reason, Lorde describes the illusion of safety as that by which “the heavy-footed hoped to silence us”: the pursuit of an impossible security paralyzes one with fear in the present.
Yet fear is not inherently paralyzing. Elsewhere in Lorde’s work she describes how fear can be examined, can be a source of insight and motivation just like other negative feelings including anger and pain. (I’ve written in detail about the connections between feelings, knowledge, and agency in Lorde’s thought.) Her powerful reflections on breast cancer begin with the mission statement not to allow “anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined.” Instead, by feeling it deeply and giving it voice, “fear becomes not a tyrant against which I waste my energy fighting, but a companion, not particularly desirable, yet one whose knowledge can be useful.”
The presence of fear is not what makes security a barren project—fear is unavoidable living in hostile worlds, and it is an appropriate response to many real threats. Rather, the limitation of security as a life project is how it affects what can be done with fear—how it prevents gaining access to fear’s productive uses. The pursuit of security weakens the ability to feel deeply and scrutinize those feelings—to examine fear, pain, and anger, as well as positive feelings like love and intimacy. This undermines the potential for feelings to give crucial information for survival in the wide sense: how the world works, how one fits within it, and what commitments and aspects of self should not be given up.
Lorde is concerned with how the project of security and its shadow of fear is transmitted across generations, “like a faint line in the center of our foreheads” (she writes in “Litany”), a weapon of oppression that works from within by directing choices and efforts away from forging and preserving her many selves. Lorde’s mother appears hauntingly across Lorde’s work as the emblem of this ambivalent inheritance, futilely cultivating a shell for her daughters so they might be, as Lorde describes in Zami, “forged into some pain-resistant replica of herself.” Yet, at the same time, crucially, Lorde’s mother imparts resources needed for survival in the full sense. In “Eye to Eye,” a powerful essay on the obstacles to solidarity between Black women (included in Sister Outsider), Lorde writes, “my mother taught me to survive from a very early age by her own example. Her silences also taught me isolation, fury, mistrust, self-rejection, and sadness. My survival lay in learning how to use the weapons she gave me, also, to fight against those things within myself.” This is a mixed inheritance, typical of what Joy James calls the captive maternal: Lorde receives tools for survival and self-preservation, but also the seeds of self-destruction.
In her poem “Prologue,” Lorde writes:
Yet when I was a child
whatever my mother thought would mean survival
made her try to beat me whiter every day
and even now the colour of her bleached ambition
still forks throughout my words
but I survived
and didn’t I survive confirmed
to teach my children where her errors lay
Embedded in such verses is what I take to be Lorde’s theory of change, how the pursuit of subsistence and security over generations can be converted into a project of survival as self-preservation. For Lorde, the inheritance of self-hatred and her mother’s aspiration to whiteness—sequelae of the white supremacist society that surrounds them—can only be overcome through her commitment to the urgent project of self-preservation and the centrality of those aspects of herself that fail to fulfill her mother’s ideals. The inherited poison is a part of the now that must be used to breed futures; that is, for Lorde it can and must be metabolized and integrated into her project of survival. For her, self-preservation means she cannot disavow the inheritance of her mother’s colorism and securitization.
Looking back at her inheritance of fear and forward at her own children both literal and figurative, Lorde describes change not as “a one-generational shot or a single investment” but as “a whole signature which you try to set in motion.” It’s a shift across generations, a continuation of survival that with each progressive iteration generates new practices of freedom and self-making.
What does it mean if philosophers take seriously Lorde’s view that survival in its more descriptive sense entails survival as this one that I am and am becoming? One effect is to make visible forms of human necessity beyond our brute causal dependence on needs like shelter, food, and freedom from physical violence. On this view, mere life is perhaps not prior to the good life; key aspects of self may be genuinely unrealizable along the paths a society makes available for pursuing safety.
What other questions might be deepened by heeding Lorde as an interlocutor? And how should philosophers engage her insights without either deifying her or tokenizing her work on a syllabus or CV? When asked whether her poetry is only for (Black) women, Lorde tells a television interviewer: “I write for and to any human being who can be touched, reached, by my work, by my words.” So, for anyone who is willing to look beyond marble statues, to listen intently, to scrutinize their own lives, and to be moved: Audre Lorde is speaking to you.
Caleb Ward
Caleb Ward is a postdoctoral scholar in philosophy at the University of Hamburg. He specializes in social philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy. His book project, In Terms of Survival: The Unflinching Philosophy of Audre Lorde, is under contract with Oxford University Press.
Website: https://www.philosophie.uni-hamburg.de/en/philosophisches-seminar/personen/ward-caleb.html
